Robust sliding mode adaptive control for lower extremity exoskeleton

To the patients with neurological injury or with chronic incomplete spinal cord injury, a gait rehabilitation exoskeleton can reproduce the motion of the user limbs and help to relearn and recover the motion of their limbs. This motion helps in the formation of user new neural path-ways to relearn to walk. In this paper, an exoskeleton type robot-assisted rehabilitation system is studied. A control architecture, which contains a sliding mode adaptive controller and a passivity based robust controller, is designed to complete the planned rehabilitation task in a safe manner. The proposed control architecture can recognize the patient´s interative forces and then realize active control under the dynamic model of the exoskeleton robot system is inaccurate. The performance of the designed control architecture of lower extremity exoskeleton is verified in the computer simulation and show the effectiveness to cope with the uncertainty in the patient-robot cooperative system.